A Man With One of Those Faces (The Dublin Trilogy Book 1)

by Caimh McDonnell

  “Christ,” said Brigit. “Bunny is bearing a grudge about a stupid hurling game?”

  “Ehm.” Phil looked sheepish. “Not exactly. Are you wearing a wire?”

  “What? Why would I be…”

  They turned at the sound of a fist being pounded on the thick glass between the pool and reception. There stood Paul, looking like a drowned rat. It appeared he’d gotten dressed without making much effort to dry himself first. It dawned on Brigit that as well as trunks, he didn’t have a towel either. It would’ve been comical but the expression on his face was anything but.

  He waved frantically at Brigit and mouthed something.

  It didn’t take a genius IQ to figure out what it was.

  Run.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  DI Jimmy Stewart was beyond annoyed.

  Annoyed was nothing but a happy memory. Angry was sailing away in the rear-view mirror. He’d now reached incandescent fury. He held the phone to his ear as he listened to the slow rhythm of the ringing tone over the white noise of the torrential rain. His heart pounded in his chest. He was standing in ankle-high grass as a frenzied torrent of rain crashed down around him. There would be flash floods. It would make the news. He had left the office so fast that he’d forgotten his coat. His suit offered no protection having become a miserable sodden weight that clung to him. He pinched at his soaking shirt front to try and let his skin breath. Underneath it, he could feel the medal of St Michael, the patron saint of Policemen, pressed against his chest. His teary-eyed mother had given it to him on his first day on the streets. She’d not spoken to her brother, Jimmy’s uncle Tom, for five years after. She’d never forgiven him for not getting her youngest that job in Guinness’s.

  Wilson stood slightly ahead of him, half in the beam from Stewart’s torch. He could sense his accusatory glare, like all of this was just the latest way of screwing with the new guy. Stewart had brought him, not so much because he was the only member of the recently assembled task force he could trust, but because he was the only one who didn’t know enough to ask questions as to where they were going and why.

  The location Quinn had sent to the map on his phone had been a yellow dot in the middle of a large green area of the Phoenix Park. Stewart had floored it; nearly giving the old lad tasked with raising the barrier on Garda HQ’s main gate a heart attack, not to mention reducing a learner driver to a blubbering wreck. He could feel bad later. Right now, his head was full of two women.

  The first was Pauline McNair. He’d never met her, didn’t even know what she looked like, but he’d done nothing and she had died. In truth, he didn’t need to know what she looked like. His mind did what it always did. Every victim was automatically replaced with someone close to him. His wife, parents, daughters, son - each had swapped places with the dead many times. He’d never told this to anyone, what would be the point? He knew what they’d say and he knew he couldn’t change it if he tried. Deep down, he didn’t want to. Somebody should care, somebody should always care. In his head, Pauline McNair was his eldest, lying in the hallway with two in the chest and one in the head, while his grandson Jack bawled in the next room. This was what made him good at the job and good for little else. It was also why he could never relax. Every time a loved one walked into the room, a retinue of ghosts crept behind them.

  The other woman was Brigit Conroy. She’d been smart, lively and alive. He was damn sure going to keep her that way. According to the map, Stewart was now standing in exactly the spot where her phone should be. All around them lay open space containing a whole lot of fuck all. The only thing they’d found had been some deer shit, which Wilson had discovered with his no-doubt expensive left shoe. All of this was why Stewart was ringing Freddie Quinn, and why he could feel that blood vessel in his temple throb.

  Just before it went to voicemail, Quinn answered and unknowingly saved his own life.

  “Hello?”

  “If this is your idea of a joke Quinn, then you have fatally misjudged my sense of humour.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What I mean is I’m standing in the middle of a wide open field and there is ab-so-lute-ly fucking nothing here. Nothing!”

  “That’s not my fault.”

  “Remember our little chat about grudges?” said Stewart. “Well, I lied. You are now numero uno on my shit list. I know a lot of people, I’m owed a lot of favours, and I’m going to use up every last one to fuck you for life if you are pissing me about now.”

  Quinn sounded suitably panicked. “Calm down, Jimmy. That’s the location that came up for the number. Hang on, maybe they’ve moved – I’ll check again.”

  “You do that.”

  “It’ll take a minute to get logged back in. Are you OK to wait?”

  “Of course I’ll wait,” snapped Stewart, “what the hell else am I going to do?”

  Upon hearing this, Wilson threw his hands in the air, in a theatrical show of exasperation.

  Stewart moved the phone away from his ear. “And you can shut up and all. Welcome to what being a detective really means. It’s not all kicking in doors and driving through piles of cardboard boxes in a Gran Torino.”

  “What on earth are you on about?” said Wilson.

  “Starsky and Hutch?”

  Wilson gave him that blank look that Stewart was becoming all too familiar with.

  “Seriously, were you raised by wolves or something?”

  Wilson didn’t respond, instead going back to wiping his soiled shoe on the grass. Deer may be the majestic royalty of the animal kingdom, but their shit still stank. Stewart could smell him from here.

  “I’m sending you my dry cleaning bill,” said Wilson.

  “Just stick it in my farewell card,” said Stewart, “it’ll be something to remember you by.”

  Stewart put the phone back to his ear. “Quinn?”

  “Nearly there.”

  Jimmy looked around again. They were a couple of hundred yards back from the road, where he could see the evening’s steady flow of traffic meandering by. The bike and pedestrian paths that ran parallel were deserted. This was the kind of weather that put all but the most hardcore lunatic joggers off, and even if a dog-walker had been willing, the pooch would have had the sense to refuse. The rest of the park slouched around them in the diluted darkness as the light from the city bounced off the clouds.

  “Nearly there and…” Quinn almost whispered it: “It’s still showing the same location.”

  “What new bullshit is this?” shouted Stewart.

  “Just hang on,” said Quinn. “It’s the park. They’ve got no mobile phone towers in there so the location is inexact.”

  “How inexact exactly?”

  “I dunno,” said Quinn, “within a couple of hundred meters maybe?”

  “Oh for… stay by the phone.”

  “But I need to…”

  “Don’t care,” said Stewart, before hanging up. He looked around him. 150 yards away at a 45-degree angle, lay an area of about a dozen trees. Not that big, but big enough to hide in, or hide a body in, thought Stewart. To the right, about 200 yards away, lay one of the ringed off ponds that were scattered intermittently around the park.

  Stewart pointed at the trees. “You take there, I’ll check out the pond.”

  Wilson looked too miserable to argue, and instead trudged off in the direction indicated. Stewart started heading towards the pond. As he walked, he made an attempt to slow his breathing. Being found dead of a heart attack on his last week on the job, face down in deer do-do, was not how he wanted to be remembered. He shone the torchlight on the ground in front of him, in an effort to preserve what was left of his shoes. He regularly had the piss taken out of him for the gleaming polish of their leather. He didn’t care. He’d been the youngest of five boys, he’d been twenty before he owned a pair that didn’t carry someone else’s scuffs.

  As he moved towards the pond, Stewart noticed something – a faint light. He turned off his torch to see
it better. Yes – there! As he moved closer, and more of it came into view, he could see the dark outline of a car parked on the far side of the pond. It was parked with its back to Stewart but he could now make out that the light was coming from the front seat. He looked in Wilson’s direction and gave a low whistle, before flashing his torch on and off. He could see the beam of Wilson’s light stop and change direction to follow him. Stewart turned off his own torch and quickened his pace. He didn’t want Conroy and Mulchrone to get spooked and bolt.

  As he got closer, Stewart thought he could make out that it was a dark blue or black BMW. He also saw the rough unpaved dirt track – on which the car was parked – leading away from the pond to one of the side roads. It must have been there to give access to the park’s groundskeeper. Along with the hammering of the rain and the dull distant rumble of the traffic on the main road, he could make out another noise now. An insistent high-pitched whine. Whatever it was, it was getting closer. He was about 80 feet from the BMW when through the trees he was able to see a single headlight beam bobbing along on the side road. A motorbike, travelling unusually slowly. As he watched it, the whine of its engine suddenly increased as it picked up speed, turned and started heading down the dirt track towards the BMW. Stewart broke into a run as he saw the motorbike kill its front light. He could see the motorcyclist outlined against the lights of the city now. He appeared to be pulling something out of his jacket.

  “GUN!” shouted Stewart, and started to draw his own from the holster under his left arm. As his hand, slick with sweat and rain, fumbled at the clasp, his right foot made contact with something. The smooth sole of his left shoe betrayed him on the soft earth. He slammed down. Hard. Messy. Face first. Couldn’t get hands out in time to break his fall. Winded. His gun spilled from his right hand, his left wrist jarred as the torch twisted. The medal of St Michael dug into his chest.

  He spluttered and spat the mouth full of wet grass. Pushed himself onto his knees and scrabbled around for the gun. “No no no no no.”

  As his hands flailed around him, he looked up at the BMW. In a film, this was when the world would go into slow motion. Instead it all seemed to be happening fast. Horribly unstoppably fast. He saw the outline of the motorbike as it slowed to a steady pace, drawing level with the stationary vehicle. He could see the arm, the gun extended. Then from the darkness, the figure of Wilson rushed by him. He stopped, crouched and unleashed a shot, just as the motorcyclist fired his weapon. The two shots rang out in quick succession, as if one was an echo of the other. The motorcyclist flew backwards off his bike so perfectly that the bike kept moving forward without him, like a riderless horse in the Grand National, still intent on winning.

  And then the screaming started.

  Chapter Thirty

  “What do you mean you’ve not got it anymore?” said Brigit.

  They were standing on the pavement outside of the kind of convenience store you could find anywhere, although it’d taken a frustratingly long and wet walk to find this one. This kind of shop didn’t normally sell umbrellas, and it turned out this one had been no exception. The Asian guy behind the counter had however agreed to sell Brigit his own personal golf umbrella for her last remaining thirty euros in cash. He was reading a university book on economics but he seemed already intimately familiar with the core concepts of his subject. It had been a seller’s market and the guy had known it. Herself and Paul were now stood huddled on the pavement under the umbrella, using this new shelter to have an argument.

  Since leaving the swimming pool, they’d taken a taxi, then a bus, followed by a walk, and then another bus, then they’d walked some more. Now, they were somewhere out in the southside suburbs that Brigit didn’t know. She’d a sneaking suspicion Paul didn’t know it either. He’d assured her they were heading somewhere, he just wanted to make sure that they weren’t followed. His paranoia had seemed justified right up until the point the heavens had opened. She’d not brought an umbrella with her when she’d left the house this morning, but then she did have a car. She’d tried to make the case for going back to get it, but the image of the bomb that might be sitting under it had rather taken the shine off that idea. It was in the Stephen’s Green car park, which was a worry. A couple of nights in there and the fees would be more than the car was worth. If she didn’t get it back by Monday, it’d be cheaper to blow it up herself.

  “They can trace mobile phones. I had to get rid of it,” said Paul.

  “But… it was my phone!”

  “Exactly, if I’d told you I was getting rid of it, you’d have made a big fuss.”

  “And exactly what do you think I’m going to do now?”

  “There’s no point now. It has already gone.”

  “But that’s because… Christ, you are infuriating! Could you not have just turned it off?”

  “No, they can still find it if it is turned off,” Paul said, before adding, “I think.”

  “You think? You think?! Well, we could check that fact by googling it on my three-month old phone, but wait – we can’t! You went and bloody threw it away!”

  “I didn’t throw it away. As such. I know where it is.”

  Brigit wasn’t even listening anymore. “I’m on a two-year contract as well and ahhh…” She threw her head back like she’d just taken a jab to the face: “I turned down the bloody insurance too!”

  “Relax, alright. Worst case scenario: I’ll buy you a new one.”

  “You’ll buy me a new one? Can I remind you, the only reason you finally admitted you’d not got my phone is because you want to spend my last eighty-five cents on a phone call. How in the hell are you going to buy me a new phone?”

  “Shush,” said Paul, glancing around nervously. “You’re causing a scene.”

  “Trust me, I have not even begun to cause a scene. Wait until I shove this golf umbrella up your…”

  “Need I remind you, people are trying to kill me?”

  “I know, and I’m about to save them a whole lot of time and effort.”

  “You’re being melodramatic now.”

  It was at this point she raised the umbrella with the sincere intent of walloping him, but she held off at the last minute as a thought occurred to her.

  “Wait. What does ‘as such’ mean? You said you haven’t thrown it away ‘as such’?”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  DI Jimmy Stewart felt numb.

  He watched the flashing blue lights on the last of the ambulances, reflecting off the dulled metal of the fencing surrounding the pond. The siren whooped once and was silent. There wasn’t any traffic to hurry out of its way in the Phoenix Park at this time if night, and nobody had what could be defined as life-threatening injuries. Well, apart from the dead guy.

  Stewart had been standing there a while, waiting, although if you asked him what for, he couldn’t have told you right then. People would have questions, lots of questions. Someone had given him an umbrella, which he duly held over himself, although he had long-since been soaked through. Behind him, the Technical Bureau guys battled to erect a tarpaulin in an utterly futile attempt to preserve the scene against the still torrential downpour.

  He stared at the BMW in silence. With all that had happened, Stewart didn’t feel like he had the brain capacity to process it all. The whole day had begun to feel like one of those unpleasant stress dreams. Maybe if he could just focus on some of the facts that clearly didn’t make sense, it would force him to wake up. Where to start though?

  Neither Brigit Conroy nor Paul Mulchrone had been in the BMW. About the only sense he’d been able to get out of the couple who had been was that their names had been Duncan McLoughlin and Keeley Mills. He’d no idea what they were doing in the middle of all of this. That wasn’t entirely true. He had a very good idea what they’d been doing. Two people in a parked car in a secluded area of the Phoenix Park after dark, his granny could figure that one out, and she’d been dead for 25 years. What he couldn’t figure out was how this related to B
rigit Conroy and Paul Mulchrone. It surely wasn’t some kind of coincidence. What were the odds that he and Wilson had stumbled upon an unrelated ambush? This was Dublin: assassination wasn’t that common a pastime.

  Speaking of unreal odds, then there’d been Wilson’s ‘hero shot’. One shot, straight through the glass visor of the helmet belonging to a motorcyclist moving at speed, taken from about 70 feet away. The odds were surely astronomical. Stewart cringed as he remembered his own tumble. He prided himself on being capable and yet, when the rubber had met the road, he’d been on his knees in the dark, searching in the long grass for his gun like a sad old fool. And Wilson, Wilson of all people, had saved the lives of Mr McLaughlin, Miss Mills and, feck it, almost certainly his too.

  He’d not even gotten a chance to thank Wilson for what he’d done. The younger man had sprinted over to his fallen foe and, upon seeing up-close the damage a bullet could do to the human head, especially after it ricochets around inside a motorbike helmet for a bit, Wilson had promptly lost his lunch and then fainted dead away, smacking his head on a rock on the way down for good measure. He’d be OK, having regained consciousness almost immediately. Stewart had cleaned him up as best he could before the first responders had arrived. It felt like the very least he could do. He’d walked him into the ambulance, once the civilians had been dealt with. Stewart would also have a word with the techs. Wilson had scored a spectacular winning goal, there was to be no mention of the unfortunate post-match incident.

  Stewart realised he was staring at the bullet hole above the front left tyre of the BMW. It was the one shot the assassin had gotten off before Wilson had so spectacularly taken him out. It couldn’t have been more than a foot from hitting the car’s occupants. One of the techs had excitedly told him the assassin’s recovered weapon had been a Glock 17 9mm with a 33-round clip. If Wilson hadn’t been here, the couple would be dead now. So, thought Stewart, would he.